The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [14]
“Here’s a lady. She went to church with her wig on, see? She was proud. What if a wind comes up? It would blow her wig right off. See? You blow.”
“Here’s a soldier. See he only has the one leg? His other leg was blown off by a cannonball at the battle of Waterloo. Do you know what a cannonball is, that shoots out of a big gun? When they have a battle? Boom!”
NOW WE WERE GOING out to the farm, in Poppy’s car, to visit the aunts. My father said no, he wouldn’t drive another man’s car— meaning he wouldn’t drive Poppy’s, wouldn’t sit where Poppy had sat—so my mother drove. That made the whole expedition feel uncertain, the weight wrongly distributed. It was a hot Sunday late in the summer.
My mother was not altogether sure of the way, and my father waited until the last moment to reassure her. This was understood to be teasing, and yet was not altogether free of reservations or reproof.
“Is it here we turn? Is it one further? I will know when I see the bridge.”
The route was complicated. Around Dalgleish most roads were straight, but out here the roads twisted around hills or buried themselves in swamps. Some dwindled to a couple of ruts with a row of plantain and dandelions running between. In some places wild berrybushes sent creepers across the road. These high, thick bushes, dense and thorny, with leaves of a shiny green that seemed almost black, reminded me of the waves of the sea that were pushed back for Moses.
There was the bridge, like two railway cars joined together, stripped to their skeletons, one lane wide. A sign said it was unsafe for trucks.
“We’ll never make it,” my father said, as we bumped on to the bridge floor. “There he is. Old Father Maitland.”
My sister said, “Where? Who? Where is he?”
“The Maitland River,” my mother said.
We looked down, where the guard-rails had fallen out of the side of the bridge, and saw the clear brown water flowing over big dim stones, between cedar banks, breaking into sunny ripples further on. My skin was craving for it.
“Do they ever go swimming?” I said. I meant the aunts. I thought that if they did, they might take us.
“Swimming?” said my mother. “I can’t picture it. Do they?” she asked my father.
“I can’t picture it either.”
The road was going uphill, out of the gloomy cedar bush on the river bank. I started saying the aunts’ names.
“Susan. Clara. Lizzie. Maggie. Jennet was the one who died.” “Annie,” said my father. “Don’t forget Annie.”
“Annie. Lizzie. I said her. Who else?”
“Dorothy,” said my mother, shifting gears with an angry little spurt, and we cleared the top of the hill, leaving the dark bush hollow behind. Up here were pasture hills covered with purple-flowering milkweed, wild pea blossom, black-eyed Susans. Hardly any trees here, but lots of elderberry bushes, blooming all along the road. They looked as if they were sprinkled with snow. One bald hill reached up higher than any of the others.
“Mount Hebron,” my father said. “That is the highest point of land in Huron County. Or so I always was told.”
“Now I know where I am all right,” my mother said. “We’ll see it in a moment, won’t we?”
And there it was, the big wooden house with no trees near it, the barn and the flowering brown hills behind. The drive shed was the original barn, built of logs. The paint on the house was not white as I had absolutely believed but yellow, and much of it had peeled away.
Out in front of the house, in a block of shade which was quite narrow at this time of day, several figures were sitting on straight-backed chairs. On the wall of the house, behind them, hung the scoured milk-pails and parts of the separator.
They were not expecting us. They had no telephone, so we hadn’t been able to let them know we were coming. They were just sitting there in the shade, watching the road where scarcely another car went by all afternoon.
One figure got up, and ran around the side of the house.